Margaret’s work was apparently finished. All her brother’s children had been guarded, educated, and married, Eleanore to the King of Portugal, Isabelle to the King of Denmark, Marie to the King of Hungary, while Ferdinand who had been educated in Spain had married Anne of Hungary and received from his brother, the Emperor, the throne of Austria, to which were added Bohemia and Hungary after the great beating back of the Turks from Vienna in 1529, since King Louis, husband of Marie, had lost his life in the terrible disaster of the battle of Mohacs in 1526, when for the moment the Moslems had been victorious and had threatened all Europe from the field where 20,000 had laid down their lives in a vain attempt to stem the heathen tide.
As for her imperial nephew Charles, he was now the unquestioned head of the Holy Roman Empire and leader of Christendom; on February 24, 1530, he was solemnly crowned by the Pope, in Bologna, with the Iron Crown of Lombardy and the crown of Charlemagne. Peace of sorts, had settled on Europe, and it was a peace of Margaret’s own making. The Lutheran heresy was sullen and threatening, but thus far there was no actual violence. There was a pause in the ominous progress of events, and tired, apprehensive Margaret determined to resign her charge to the Emperor, who was coming from his crowning to visit her in Malines, and retire to one of the convents she herself had founded. She had earned the peace she desired, and a greater peace, which was accorded her by the grace of God, for on November 30, 1530, she died from an overdose of opium given her by her physicians in preparation for an operation that had become necessary, owing to an injury to a foot which had not been properly treated.
She died as she had lived, thoughtful for others, generous, meek in spirit, sincerely and devotedly a Catholic. All the Netherlands mourned for her as a righteous and able governor and, after the imposing funeral services in Bruges, she was carried through the snow, along the road she had followed on her wedding journey, thirty years before, to the church at Brou, where she was placed by the side of the husband, who had been hers for so few years, and for love of whom she had built the most beautiful shrine in Europe.
The church at Brou is the last of Gothic art, and Margaret of Austria, by the love of her people, Margaret of Malines, was the last of the great and righteous and pious women of the age that had made this art its own.
With the passing of Margaret, Malines ceased to be the capital of the Netherlands, but for compensation in some sort it was made an archbishopric; and though its great palaces have passed with its glory, the hoarded art and the
A DETAIL FROM THE CHURCH AT BROU
marvellous library of the Regent gone to feed the fires of sacrilege or enrich the galleries of the uttermost parts of the earth, though its wealth is no more and throngs of finely clad burghers and merchants no longer enrich its winding streets with the pageant of a wedded Mediævalism and Renaissance, out of this ecclesiastical aggrandisement has come in these later days a new honour to Malines; for when war and pillage again swept it with the flames of hell, it was the Cardinal of Malines, Archbishop Mercier, who dared to stand forth and defy the spoiler, while shaming his too-cautious ecclesiastical superior, weighing, vacillating, counting costs and profits in the midst of his buzzing curia.